Jason Dodge is having his second solo exhibition at the Galleria Massimo De Carlo, opening on Thursday, May 8 till June 28, 2008. Various items measured: a white leather glove burnt by gold. A stovepipe with a silver tube which is filled with the seeds of poison hemlock. Mariele Scholz, a German hand weaver, has woven the height from the earth to above the weather, 12 km in a yarn that she chose as the color of night. Instruments of a brass band, laying on the floor, covered in a sheet of plastic. The works of Jason Dodge, artist born 1969 in Newtown who lives and works in Berlin, reference events that lie in the past or at an unreachable distance, events that occurred in discrete privacy or were so transient that they could not be captured. Yet the objects he displays often function as traces of earlier actions, in the exhibition space or elsewhere, and instill a paradoxical feeling of presence and absence. Dodge’s installations give rise to a feeling of longing; when viewing them, one must always consider what they lack. In no time at all, the viewer’s thoughts will lead to a distant place – the intimacy of a private house, for example, the city of Lübeck, or above the weather. As relics, the objects of his installations seem to yearn for the completion that only the viewer can accomplish to his own thoughts. Literature is an important stimulus for Dodge’s work. But rather than specific novels or poems, it is the act of writing itself – the application of ink to paper – that sparks certain ideas. In a similar process, the objects in his works present themselves to the viewer as words of a story. Yet the story is never linear; it opens up different spaces of association for different people. Dodge has shown work internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including the 2008 Le Havre Biennial, and the 2005 Performa at the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art in New York. He also exhibited at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, 2006, and at the Kunstwerke in Berlin, 2006.